This morning I had the honor of appearing on CNBC to announce the results of the 2013 Gartner Executive Programs CIO survey and CIO agenda report. Follow this link to the video and this link to the press announcement. The title of this year’s report revolves around extending technology’s role in the enterprise to include hunting and harvesting for digital value. Theme reflects the results of more than 2,000 companies representing $230 billion dollars in CIO IT budgets covering 36 industries and 41 countries.

Here is the story in a nutshell, expressed as a Pixar pitch.

“Once upon a time, CIOs knew that doing the right thing required tending to IT by delivering cost effective quality services. CIOs and IT leaders managed cost, complexity and risk to enable business operations in a world of managed stability. However, the world outside IT changed, recession replaced growth, volatility replaced stability, dynamic change replaced predetermined plans, front office digital technology became more important than back office operational IT. Because of this, IT finds itself in the midst of a quiet crisis. Demands increased, as the world grew dynamic and digital. Because of this, the harder CIOs work tended to current concerns, the less relevant IT becomes and past core capabilities become future core rigidities. Until, CIOs realized that the future rests in not repeating the past but in extending IT by Hunting and Harvesting in a Digital World.”

Technology needs a new story.

Technology needs a new story, because executives need a new reason to invest in IT. Global CIO IT budgets are expected to decline an average of 0.5% for 2013, marking a continuation of IT’s decade of devaluation and another round of IT strategies based on doing more with less – really just doing the same with less.

IT’s current story revolves current operations, concerns with a focus on cost, quality and services. It is a story defined by IT’s role as ‘tender’ of the IT garden of legacy applications, outsourced operations and limited value creation.

The current story is not working as CIOs responding to this year’s survey indicated that on average their organizations realize ONLY 43% of technology’s potential. Clearly this number needs to increase if organizations are to create value via technology. Surprisingly, when I have talked with CIO’s directly a number feel that this number is ‘about right!” I guess it is about right if you want people to continue to draw resources aware from IT, after all you get what you pay for and if you want to get less, then you pay for less.

The only problem with IT’s old story is that it works only in situations where IT is seen as part of the machinery, working in the back room, part of sales, general and administrative (SG&A) costs, etc. That would be ok if IT were administrative in nature – like HR or Finance – but is that an appropriate role for technology?

Maintaining IT’s existing story basically makes IT administrative rather than strategic, operational, and a contributing capability for the simple reason that todays story does not provide the business rational for investing in IT as the return on that investment can be achieved by just keeping IT costs down in the first place. This leaves IT and the enterprise anemic in terms of its ability to use technology to create value because:

IT is losing its capacity to deliver strategic change as a greater percent of resources are assigned to operations rather than transformation.

IT is losing its ability to attract enterprise resources and funding necessary as there is no need to increasing when you are not increasing scope or results.

IT is losing the capability to build the new skills and attract the creative, engaging, business oriented people needed to build new digital customer experiences, products, services and operation.

It is concerning that around half of CIOs surveyed do not see IT’s enterprise role changing over the next three years. This means that these issues will persist and without change, CIOs and IT consign themselves to tending a garden of legacy assets and responsibilities. These three areas represent the fundamental challenges highlighted in the figure below:

New Roles for Technology in a Digital World

Digital technology causes executives to want more from technology and to recognize that getting 43% of technology potential is not enough. Realizing more from technology and moving beyond IT requires expanding how IT views itself and others view IT. There are three ‘roles’ that IT must adopt they are:

Tending is managing IT’s current operational and investment responsibilities within existing constraints where IT needs stability, cost management and quality of service.

Hunting occurs in situations where IT needs to be out in front — scouting and finding innovations and opportunities beyond enterprise boundaries. Some hunting projects will fail, but each helps the enterprise learn about digital technologies and value. The result is an accelerating rate of performance as new technology and business innovations take the enterprise beyond current operations.

Harvesting occurs in situations where IT needs to raise business performance by actively changing business processes, extending products and services, and replicating best practices. Unlike tending, harvesting transforms IT infrastructure, operations and applications to produce additional results.

Now these roles are nothing new, but what is new is the context in which they exist. These are the business priorities shown in the figure below. Business executives expect technology to do more than work ‘in the business’ as they need technology that changes the business in order to support the combination of growth, operational improvement, costs, customers and new technologies.

Hunting for digital innovation and harvesting that value across the enterprise describes a deeper role for technology in the enterprise. The combination of tending, hunting and harvesting reflect the full spectrum of technology value delivery that leaders are already using to create a digital edge and digital difference.

CIOs recognize that past stability is no guarantee of future success, particularly when the world has changed right from under IT. Adapting to and leading in the digital world requires doing things differently, yet in ways consistent with the demands of digital technologies.

IT is not going away; it just needs to change — not because it is wrong, but because the world has changed and enterprises are realizing only a fraction of technology’s potential.

Its time to unleash technology to hunt for growth and value, harvest enterprise benefits at scale and continue to tend to day to day operations. Those three activities describe the range required to consider when delivering your 2013 agenda. More to come …

[…] Harvesting—occurs in situations where IT needs to raise business performance by actively changing business processes, extending products and services, and replicating best practices. . . read more here. […]

From my own point of view, the accurate differentiation between the Tending, Hunting and Harvesting drivers could be applied consistently to the categorization of IT investment portfolio : this could enable more effective management of portfolio delivery and contribute to increase the current average transformation rate (43%).

Thanks for your comment and for reading the blog. Tending, Hunting and Harvesting refer to behaviors/roles for IT that work in conjunction with budget and solution views of how IT creates value. Equating a budget view such as Run, Grow, Transform with these behaviors is direct, but it also oversimplifies the relationship between budget, role and activity. Innovation teams require operational or run funding. Tending activities can include growth investments for capacity or performance. Transformation investments impact how IT tends to current operations.

Effective management of portfolio delivery is important. If all I get is exactly what I pay for, then chances are I will not pay for all the things I need. That is part of the low realization rate (43%) of technologies potential.

Matching budget to role has played a part in draining IT of its innovation and transformational capability as a decade of concentrating on cost reduction and running the business have devalued IT capacity and capability. In the future where IT needs to do more than tend to current concerns, I would suggest it also has to manage its portfolio with greater sophistication as it needs to deliver a range of value and that requires playing roles beyond a few budget categories.

That was what we are trying to get at by these three behaviors, you have to do all three in the future as tending/running is no longer sufficient.

Mark – excellent overview of the problem space. I think the one glaring omission is that this is really a leadership issue. If something’s not working – stop doing it. This is about the CIO’s ability to access why IT is not able to deliver, develop a transformational strategy and then execute on the strategy to turn things around. What makes this so difficult and “uncomfortable” is that this is a skill set / HR portfolio management and not a technology/business porfolio issue.

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Wonderful article from my broad organizational design perspective. The only concern I have is that any area (including HR & Finance) be relegated to “administration.” Our organizations need to be working together to move forward across all the areas of the organization, and across human, technical, and process dimensions.

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